Vendémiaire publishing house in Paris has issued a book by Oleg Voskoboynikov, Professor at the HSE School of History and Tenured Professor of HSE. The book is called ‘For centuries and centuries. Christian civilization of the Medieval West’ (Pour les siècles des siècles. Civilisation chrétienne de l'Occident médiéval. Paris, Vendémiaire, 2017).

One of the chapters in Springer’s newly released academic volume Transforming Education is co-authored by IOE education innovation researcher Diana Koroleva. Entitled Coup D’etat in the Panopticon: Social Networking in Education, the paper has been inspired by a series of seminars in philosophy Diana was attending on her doctoral track at the IOE Graduate School of Education.

Working paper

Social Trust and Media Consumption in Democratic and Non-Democratic Societies

Generalized trust is an information- and risk-based resource enabling communication in modern society. Mass media channels can reduce or increase generalized trust, but their effects are dependent on the social context. The purpose of this paper is to examine how different types of media consumption are related to generalized social trust under democratic and nondemocratic regimes. In modern societies generalized trust and mass media serve as mechanisms to overcome information-based uncertainty. We propose and investigate hypotheses on how the relation between news media consumption and social trust differs in democratic and nondemocratic societies. Using multilevel regression modelling on the nationally representative World Values Survey data from more than 75,000 people in 53 countries across the world (2011-2014) and international democracy indices, we look into the interactive effects of regular use of the Internet and television news and generalized trust in democratic and nondemocratic countries. The results show that, irrelevant of the political regime, regular news consumption from television is associated with lower trust to strangers. However, using Internet news in nondemocratic countries is linked with an additional decrease in trust to strangers. We discuss how these findings run against the argument of the bridging effect of the Internet in nondemocratic countries and support the mean-world hypothesis irrelevant of the political regime.

Shirokanova A. Basic research program. WP BRP. National research university Higher School of economics, 2015. No. 60.

This paper deals with the recently revealed paradox that contemporary Muslims demonstrate a stronger Protestant work ethic (PWE) than contemporary Protestants do. I test whether this paradox is supported in a multilevel analysis on internationally comparative WVS data. According to Inglehart’s theory of post-materialist shift, work ethic should be stronger in the developing societies that do not have enough existential security. Following the debate on the Protestant work ethic I test another hypothesis saying that the effects of PWE extend beyond the religious population of Protestant countries. On waves four and five of the World Values Survey, I compare the strength of work ethic between the Muslims and Protestants in multilevel ordinal outcome models. The models built on 26,156 respondents in 56 countries show no significance in work ethic between Muslims and Protestants, all else being equal. Living in a historically Protestant society does not increase work ethic by itself, but being religious in a Protestant society does. In all developed countries, work ethic is likely to decrease. Overall, the evidence of a stronger work ethic among the Muslims is changeable; in some models, Muslims are likely to have a stronger work ethic than Protestants, but in other models Muslims are not significantly different from Protestants. This poses further research questions about the universal features of different religious ethics and on the non-religious factors explaining the progress linked with the Protestant work ethic.

The book reveals the interconnection between social, cultural and political protest movements and social and economic changes in a post-communist country like Russia still dominated by bureaucratic rulers and "oligarchs" controlling all basic industries and mining activities. Those interests are also dominating Russia’s foreign policy and explain why Russia did not succeed in becoming an integral part of Europe. The latter is, at least, wished by many Russian citizens.

The presented article continues the series of studies of state characteristics, which are high in topicality at the moment. The attention is paid to the problem of developing the complex approach for examination of the “state capture” phenomenon, based on conventional theories. Author carries out the critical analysis of approaches, reveals the extent of usage of the term and as a result “clarifi es” it. It allows making a revised conceptualization of the “state capture” phenomenon with distinguishing certain stages of the process and minimizing the normative aspect of the theory. The fi nal part of study presents operationalization of the examined phenomenon and its correlation with the access to power and quality of institutions.

The article is devoted to analysis of concepts reputation and reputation management in conditions of modern Russian political reality. The author tries to determine positions of reputation communications in political sphere of Russia, which have a goal of social trust (base of strong civil society) development.

According to the recent theories of urban management there are the following types of city political regimes: pluralistic, federalist, enterprising, progressive middle class. Growing interest to this approach abroad inspires to use it in relation to nowadays Russia.

The article is devoted to the problem of emerging knowledge economy in modern Russia. The author argues that knowledge economy can exist only under conditions of favorable institutions. It is first about institute of property which is unspecified in Russia. It means that property rights arent well-defined. The shaping of such kind of institutional framework is the result of contradictory political and economical development. The author assumes that institute of property was framed by interaction between key political and economical decision-makers. For a long period of time there werent any actors interested in the effective regime of property. Thus for today the problem of creation knowledge economy in Russia is mainly political then economical problem.

A collection of articles on contemprorary Russia by Russian authors; the book is organized in three parts: Part 1: Political Economy, Political Geography and the Politics of Federalism; Part 2: Regime, Ideology, Public Opinion and Legitimacy; Part 3: Civil Society: Defeat and Radicalization?

This article examines the linguistic tools adopted by Twitter users to express their personal opinion on the Tea Party movement in the USA. The purpose of the current research is to define the link between the content of the message and the way it is expressed either implicitly or explicitly. The focus is on the linguistic tools aimed at fulfilling different functions. The investigation is based on the content analysis of tweets collected for three months and processed by program Atlas.ti. The program allows the coding of messages, defining the frequency of codes and their correlations. We conclude that people tend to express their opinion explicitly if they are positive about the protest or their aim is to proselytize. Simultaneously, Twitter users take advantage of metaphors, quotations and questions to express their opinion implicitly if they are negative or critical about the movement. The findings of this research illustrate how Twitter users communicate with each other and discuss political issues, and in what way they influence each other’s opinion using various linguistic tools while being restricted to only 140 characters.

This article is about alternative strategies of constitutional transformation in the period of elaboration of the Russian Constitution of 1993. The author analyses historical origins of basic constitutional principles such as parliament democracy, separation of powers and different forms of government and their interpretation during political crisis of the period under consideration.

Adult mortality has been lower in Kyrgyzstan vs. Russia among males since at least 1981 and among females since 1999. Also, Kyrgyzstan’s mortality fluctuations have had smaller amplitude. This has occurred in spite of worse macro-economic outcomes in Kyrgyzstan. To understand these surprising patterns, we analyzed cause-specific mortality in Kyrgyzstan vs. Russia for the period 1981-2010, using unpublished official data. We find that, as in Russia, fluctuations in Kyrgyzstan have been primarily due to changes in external causes and circulatory causes, and alcohol appears to play an important role. However, in contrast with Russia, mortality from these causes in Kyrgyzstan has been lower and has increased by a smaller amount. As a result, the mortality gap between the two countries is overwhelmingly attributable to external and cardio-vascular causes, and more generally, to causes that have been shown to be strongly related to alcohol consumption. These cause-specific results, together with the existence of large ethnic differentials in mortality in Kyrgyzstan, highlight the importance of cultural and religious differences, and their impact on patterns of alcohol consumption, in explaining the mortality gap between the two countries. These findings show that explanatory frameworks relying solely on macro-economic factors are not sufficient for understanding differences in mortality levels and trends among former Soviet republics.

Galaskiewicz J., Mayorova O. V., Duckles B. M. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 2013. Vol. 647. No. 1. P. 50-82.

This article addresses the questions, What do children in urban areas do on Saturdays? What type of organizational resources do they have access to? Does this vary by social class? Using diary data on children’s activities on Saturdays in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metropolitan area, the authors describe the different types of venues (households, businesses, public space, associations, charities, congregations, and government/tribal agencies) that served different types of children. They find that the likelihood of using a charity or business rather than a government or tribal provider increased with family income. Also, the likelihood of using a congregation or a government facility rather than business, charity, or household increased with being Hispanic. The authors discuss implications for the urban division of labor on Saturdays and offer research questions that need further investigation.

This research focuses on estimating the signalling role of education on the Russian labour market. Two well-known screening hypotheses are initially considered. According to first of these, education is an ideal filter of persons with low productivity: education does not increase the productivity of a person, but it does give him the possibility to signal about his innate productivity via an educational certicate. The second of these hypotheses admits that productivity actually does increase during the period of study, but nevertheless the main objective of getting an education is to acquire a signal about one's productivity. Information theory suggests that employees use education signals during the hiring processes whereby employers screen potential employees. Employers and other categories of self-employed workers are usually not screened by the labour market via their educational attainments. Comparison of the returns to education of employees vs. self-employed workers could show the difference between the returns to signals and the returns to human capital. Yet another way to understand the signals is to consider the time dynamics of the returns to education for employees staying in the same firm. This helps us to answer the question about whether the signals are valuable only during the hiring process, or whether they remain valuable during the whole experience with the firm. This research is based on the Mincerian-type earnings functions, estimated on RLMS-HSE and NOBUS data. On the basis of the available information, we cannot say that the returns to signals and human capital differ significantly in Russia. Nevertheless we can say that, for the majority of men, the return to educational signals decreases with time spent in the same firm, while we observe the opposite for women.

This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.